The Church and Man's Rights
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted among men."1
In these days when, under the plea of Progress, many political craftsmen are remaking pagan totalitarianism, these self-evident truths of the Declaration of Independence must be again accepted and declared.
These self-evident truths are not self-existent, as the self-evidence of the grass is not self-existence. In spite of their self-evidence, the truths proclaimed by the signatories of the Declaration grew out of deeper truths whose very depths made them largely hidden to the common run of men.
Let us dig a little about these deeper truths which give life and self-evidence to the truths proclaimed to the world in July 1776 by men who made profession of God, their Creator.
1. Though the Declaration makes no explicit mention of duties, as it does of rights, the chief draftsman of the Declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was too competent a social thinker to forget that the relation between them was the relation of cause and effect; or still more accurately of end and means. Duty is towards an end; rights are in a means to an end.
2. Duty may be defined as "a moral as distinguished from a physical or merely natural necessity." Non-living beings, as the chemical elements and compounds have their necessities, none of which can be changed by man; but as they have no knowledge these are merely physical and not moral necessities. Again the non-rational but sentient beings have necessities (of life and happiness?); but as they do not act deliberately and reflexively, these necessities, though psychological, are not moral. By his free will, however, man has the power of apprehending an end, explicitly as an end requiring means for its attainment.
Of course, as a material and sentient being, man has many physical and psychological necessities, yet he has other and higher moral necessities which come from his unique endowment of free will. Thus a father has no physical necessity to support his children; nor has a citizen a physical necessity to defend his country. The father, however, is called upon to support his family and a citizen to defend his country by what we call a moral necessity or duty.
3. Now if duty is altogether in the sphere of necessity, rights are altogether in the sphere of power or possibility. Qui vult finem vult media — who wishes the end must wish the means. Moreover, who commands the end must provide the means. If a citizen, by command, has the duty of defending his country, he has a right (against his country) of weapons, etc. for fulfilling his duty. From this we draw the following definition of right.
A right is a moral as distinguished from a physical power of having the means to fulfill a duty. The most dramatic example of this distinction and vital relation between duty (to an end) and right (to the means) is in the prayer which God gave us when men asked Him to teach them to pray.
The first three petitions are statements of man's (supernatural) end and duty. They are accurately formulated in an optative mood. Hallowed be thy name — Thy kingdom come — Thy will be done. When man has these three ultimate duties laid upon him by God, he has now relative rights with God. These human rights are expressed not in an optative nor even in an indicative, but in an imperative mood. Give us this day our daily bread — Forgive us our trespasses — Lead us not into temptation.
4. It is clear that if rights are conferred by the one who imposes duties, man has not an inalienable but only a conditional right against the author of the duty. The general whom a country commands to lead its army has rights, against his country, for the necessary means to fulfill his duty. These rights are only conditional on his country commanding or commissioning him to his work. His country by withdrawing his commission, withdraws his rights. Hence, against an authority which by issuing commands confers rights, no man has only inalienable rights.
5. There are higher and lower authorities. There is the authority, say, of the officer on point duty; there is the authority of Congress, or of the President. Against the lower authority a citizen has rights which come from his duty to a higher authority. A citizen of New York has rights against New York in case his country, exercising its higher authority, lays upon him duties incompatible with his duties to New York. Hence no one has inalienable rights against a legitimate authority unless over that legitimate authority there is a higher authority to which it has duties. If legitimate authority is the ultimate authority the subject of that authority has no inalienable rights.
Hence, too, the framers of the Declaration of Independence "builded better than they knew" when they grounded man's inalienable rights even against legitimate authority, not just on man's equality, but on the fact that in comparison with man's infinite Creator the trivial bodily and mental inequalities of men were are nothing; and that towards the Creator, the absolute and ultimate authority, man had duties which gave him some inalienable rights against any lesser and human authority.
The history of social institutions since 1776 proves how wisely the draftsmen and signatories of this Declaration were guided. France of the Revolution, under the influence of a group of men who were mostly young, sought to better the Declaration by leaving out the Creator. Today, France is reaping in shame what it sowed in pride. For the moment, France is under a power which professes to be the ultimate authority whose subjects have no inalienable rights.
6. Although there is but one Catholic name among the signatories of the Declaration of Independence, there is not one of its indisputable truths that does not come to it from a Catholic source. The Church by its essential principles and by its martyrs for these principles had given the people of these islands and their children across the seas, the sense of undeniable duties to God which endowed them with inalienable rights against any groupings of their fellow-men.
Any student of the Catholic Church today will realize that, in a measure not found in any other human institution, it is based on the professed doctrine that it is only a lower, vicarious authority functioning in a partial sphere, under a higher, absolute, ultimate authority — God. Hence for the Catholic Church, even the unborn life has inalienable rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness".
Historically speaking, the men who framed the Declaration were but reaping by their successful struggle for freedom what had been sown by Catholics in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland. The group of totalitarians who followed the Machiavelli-trained Cromwell in their efforts to guide men, body and soul, were met with heroic opposition from every group of religious thought. No group suffered so long and so keenly as those whose two chief leaders are now canonized saints: St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More.
London, where they lived and died in defense of man's inalienable rights, has as yet no sufficient memorial of them, though close by the Houses of Parliament it has a noble statue of Abraham Lincoln. Perhaps one day, when their unpayable gift to freedom is recognized, pictures of John Fisher and Thomas More may be found on the walls of the room immortalized by the Declaration of Independence.
Endnotes
1 Declaration of Independence.
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